Ernesto and Peter Arnett

Ernesto, the ceramic skull I bought in Cozumel years ago, is slowly being overtaken by the jungle in the living room. He probably doesn't mind. He's from a pretty jungly place.

It rained all day yesterday, so I didn't leave the house except to go out in the back garden a couple of times. I downloaded the footage from the garden cam and it was boring, so I deleted it all. Once again I didn't have the camera in a good position.

Later, I boiled an egg that had come to us in the carton with part of the shell missing. The only thing between the innards of the egg and the outside world was a sort of thin membrane, which I decided made it risky to eat. So I took it out to the foxes and reset the camera. Maybe we'll get some footage of them having a feast, though the last time I gave them a boiled egg a magpie ate it. (The egg looked fine, once cooked and peeled, and I have no doubt a fox could digest it just fine!)

I hope to take a walk some time today, but maybe not down Billy Fury Way. Remember how Olga and I walked there occasionally, even though it's a fairly grimy footpath? Well, the paper has an awkwardly headlined story -- "Seven-Week Lights Blackout in Drug-Hit Path" -- about how none of the streetlights there are working at the moment. I might go there in daylight, but I think I'd want a dog with me, not that Olga was ever a very fierce protector.

The orchid in the kitchen is blooming like crazy, underneath the yellowish overhead light. You can see the rain on the window. It was that kind of day.

I also saw in the news that Peter Arnett died. I actually have a Peter Arnett story, from my own reporting career in Florida. In the late '80s and early '90s, I worked at the newspaper in Lakeland, east of Tampa. A magazine called the Washingtonian reported that Arnett, who was representing CNN in Baghdad during the first Iraq war, was going to marry his more youthful girlfriend, a fellow journalist who had attended college in Lakeland and whose parents still lived there. So I got sent out to interview the parents.

It was a rather awkward story to write, because 1) It was basically just gossip column fodder, and 2) It's always risky to write about what someone is "going to do," rather than wait until they've done it, and 3) Arnett and his alleged bride-to-be were both in the Middle East, so I couldn't talk to either person directly involved in the relationship. I had to rely on the parents for information. I churned something out and it ran in the paper and that was that...

...except that Arnett never did marry the woman. He wound up going back to his wife, from whom he had been separated. By that time I was gone from Lakeland and the world had moved on. C'est la vie.

Anyway, it wasn't the brightest spot in my journalism career and apparently I didn't even save a clipping of the story. About fifteen years later, when I was working for The New York Times Co. in Manhattan, we paired with Google to have the archives of all of our smaller newspapers, including the Lakeland paper, digitized and made available online. It used to be that stories like this one I wrote would come up with a Google search. But then the Times sold the papers and I believe the new owners took their archives offline, because I can't find any of that stuff out there now. Again, c'est la vie.